Enterprise software major SAP has piped giants like Salesforce, Oracle, and Adobe when it comes to serving the B2B digital commerce market globally, according to the IDC.
After a thorough evaluation of SAP’s strategies and capabilities, IDC has positioned the company in the Leaders’ category within its latest ‘2020 IDC MarketScape for B2B digital commerce platforms’.
According to the IDC report, SAP offers a broad and deep portfolio of customer experience applications, including CRM, marketing, CPQ, and service.
“Customers we interviewed rated SAP above average when asked whether SAP Commerce Cloud is ‘built for the future’. One customer commented, ‘This is where SAP is really good. They were a bit late to market here but have gotten ahead,” the report mentioned.
The company’s B2B digital commerce product, SAP Commerce Cloud, is a B2B and B2C digital commerce platform that was originally acquired by SAP with the acquisition of hybris in 2013.
SAP has launched a new multi-tenant SaaS and microservices-based digital commerce application in June 2019 called “SAP Upscale Commerce” (which was not considered in this IDC report).
“Consider SAP if you are an enterprise looking for an all-in-one digital commerce platform that can handle complex enterprise requirements and can support both B2B and B2C business models or you use SAP for other CX applications,” the IDC MarketScape report mentioned.
“Selecting the right cloud B2B digital commerce platform can be extremely hard; there isn’t a one-size-fits-all vendor, and the market is evolving extremely fast,” said Jordan Jewell, research manager, Digital Commerce programme at IDC.
According to the IDC, SAP’s context-driven services provide deep personalisation capabilities to tailor commerce experiences.
There are, however, some challenges too.
“SAP Commerce Cloud can be deployed in the cloud, but it is not yet fully multi-tenant SaaS. While SAP still sees demand for its offering, IDC firmly believes the future of B2B digital commerce is multi-tenant SaaS,” said the report.
SAP in May announced the launch of SAP Commerce Cloud and S/4 HANA Cloud on their India data center to help enterprises meet end-to-end customer demands, make commerce frictionless while ensuring compliance with the Personal Data Protection Bill.
As enterprises go digital in the Covid-19 era, SAP Commerce Cloud will offer a comprehensive, end-to-end commerce solution powering real-time, intelligent customer engagement with personalized experiences.
In July, the enterprise software major appointed former Adobe executive Kulmeet Bawa as President and Managing Director for the India subcontinent.
